Twitter sues 5 most aggressive tool providers and spammers

It looks like there will be a few people who won’t be named on Follow Friday anytime soon. Twitter took steps to protect its users last week when it filed a federal lawsuit against a group of tool providers and spammers.

The social media site has been waging war against websites that bombard tweeps with automated tweets hawking products or infected with viruses. On occasion, these websites can even assert control over users’ accounts.

As part of Twitter’s efforts to combat these rogue activities, it sued TweetAttacks, TweetAdder, TweetBuddy, James Lucero of justinlover.info and Garland Harris of troption.com, whom the social media site viewed as the most egregious of the “bad actors” currently plaguing users.

“This morning, we filed suit in federal court in San Francisco against five of the most aggressive tool providers and spammers,” Twitter posted in its blog. “With this suit, we’re going straight to the source. By shutting down tool providers, we will prevent other spammers from having these services at their disposal. Further, we hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter.”

In addition to the lawsuit, Twitter added that its engineering team continues to implement other spam-reducing solutions to the site. Last week, Twitter launched a new measure to more aggressively suspend a new type of “@ mention spam.” Twitter also will use its t.co link shortener to analyze whether tweeted links lead to malware or malicious content.

“We are committed to fighting spam on all fronts, by continuing to grow our anti-spam team and using every tool at our disposal to shut down spammers,” Twitter wrote. “Today marks an important step forward.”